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Lot essay

In 1959 Boyd left Australia for Europe and for the next nine years was based in London. It was from his home near Hampstead Heath that the artist commenced the Nebuchadnezzar series; a theme that he would explore prolifically through paintings and graphic works over an extended period of time.

Seated Nebuchadnezzar and Crying Lion is from the first series of Nebuchadnezzar paintings, which is arguably the most significant series of Boyd's eventual prolific output on the Nebuchadnezzar theme. Consisting of fifty-eight paintings, this original series was exhibited in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in 1968. Additional Nebuchadnezzar paintings were exhibited at the Tooth Gallery in London in October and November of that same year. A second version of this painting titled Nebuchadnezzar with a Crying Lion (No.2) was one of eighteen paintings on the theme that were exhibited in a retrospective of Boyd's work which was held at the Richard DeMarco Gallery as part of the Edinburgh Festival in 1969.

Boyd began the series in 1966, while living in a house near to Hampstead Heath. In 1966 Hampstead Heath was the site of anti-Vietnam protests which included self-immolations. It has been suggested that the fiery tones and flame imagery which appear in many of the Nebuchadnezzar paintings were in part a response to these protests. The suggestion that the series contains contemporary political associations is entirely possible given Boyd's penchant for an allegorical style of painting.

The story of the crimes, downfall and eventual redemption of the ancient Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar is told in the Old Testament. His arrogance led him to commit idolatry and to sack Jerusalem, for which crimes he was banished to the wilderness for seven years and forced to eat and dwell with the beasts of the field. Seated Nebuchadnezzar and Crying Lion is situated towards the end of the narrative cycle and is one of the more gentle and optimistic images in the series. The ruler, who had been reduced to a bestial state, is now counter-balanced by the tears and human compassion of the lion, which plays a part in Nebuchadnezzar's redemption. In the 1972 book of the Nebuchadnezzar paintings, with text by the Oxford medieval scholar T.S.R Boase, this painting was accompanied by the following simple words: "The lion lays its head in the king's lap and weeps, and the beast's sympathy brings a semblance of restored humanity to the outcast ruler." (T.S.R. Boase, op.cit, unpaginated)

Boyd created the Nebuchadnezzar and the Potter series concurrently; the first being concerned with Biblical narrative and universal themes, while the latter depicted the personal history of his potter father Merric Boyd, and was quieter in tone and execution. However, despite their different concerns, Hoff drew a parallel between the Potter series and this particular painting, commenting that "the theme of 'the potter' had already made an unexpected appearance in one of the paintings - Seated Nebuchadnezzar and Crying Lion in which the king, in uniform, holds a pot between his hands, while the seated lion sheds tears like the Wolf of Gubbio in the St Francis series. In addition the king has the features of the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka, whom Boyd had met during these years." (U Hoff, op.cit, p.60) Boyd had first encountered the Expressionist work of Oscar Kokoschka in 1935 in Australia, via postcard reproductions. In 1962 he met Kokoschka, the same year in which Kokoschka had a retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London. It would appear therefore that in this painting Boyd has melded the images and attributes of his father and Kokoschka.

Hoff went on to praise the painting in the following terms: "This peculiar force is found also in Nebuchadnezzar and the Crying Lion, where the thick yellow impasto of the lion, with its paint surface worked up almost into a facsimile of the lion's curly mane, utterly dominates the haunted shadowy figure of the king. Boyd's representation of the lion is a tour de force in communicating the essence of the beast, with its startling forward projection and the power of that great, muscular, tapering torso." (Hoff, op.cit, p. 24)

In the catalogue for the 1994 Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Barry Pearce commented on the significance of the Nebuchadnezzar series in Boyd's oeuvre in the following terms: "Indeed the series was, and remains, his most sustained. But we know enough about Boyd's obsessions to see beyond a prolific act of story-telling. His private anxieties and his social conscience intersected at a point of white heat to produce the most sumptuously executed paintings of his career. (B Pearce, Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Sydney, 1993, p.26)

Cataloguing & details

Provenance

Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1968